The Future of Innovation

The Future Of Innovation ... Enabling Hope

Mr Chin Hoon Lau

The future of innovation is tightly coupled to its ability to enable the future in the way aspired by humanity. Humanity is very often felt through innovation. Humanity shines brighter as innovation find its ways to more and bigger purposes. Humanity is where innovation triumphs and its future assured.

This very uncertain time, which can be hard and suffering, bless us with a historic window for rebuilding. Seeking collective security and strength, a nation may choose to resurrect the past (be it romantically real or imaginarily idolized), or charge forward to innovate the future. The world will become more and more divided along the line of innovation positives and innovation negatives with widening conflicts and confrontations.

To fill up this innovation gap, every nation and responsible leaders need to know where do they stand in global innovativeness which indicates the state of their future. Present competitive and productivity reports are a picture of immediate past which are definitely insufficient to diagnose and identify weaknesses in human capital development strategy and investment. A global comparative study of innovation capability of nations is called for to afford positive intervention, support and international collaboration at an earliest possible stage. Such global innovation commons will definitely be more productive than the “new world order”. Furthermore, shared boundary innovation made feasible through the intensified cross-cultural interactions shall alleviate the “clash of civilizations”.

Political leaders tend to get addicted if not tied up to vested interests of status quo. As a result, they hardly learn and innovate. Change takes place normally only as a response to external pressure. As innovative projection of a nation become available, political parties and stakeholders will have to be more accountable to and be evaluated by what they have performed to secure a better future for their people, rather than hiding under historical report cards or present tangibles.

There is a need for intervention at the sensitive root of problems or needs of most nations i.e. its value system. The mismatch of value over time, space and contextual framework , or its mismatch with desired outcome is the main cause of loss in economic sustainability, social cohesion and most sadly, the opportunity to advance. Innovation framework and tools must be utilized to translate intangible values into a quantitative value scoreboard, for instance, to project how by degrading public education system into a tool for political agenda or religious utopia, the children will be deprived of being educated as a liberated being with the knowledge and strength needed to guard their tradition.

Innovation must not be perceived as another disappointing piece of cancer research discovery. Innovation does not just work on laboratory mice. Innovation works on human too. Advances in innovation in corporate management and technology can be drawn to help leaders solve complex problems. Systemic innovation is the path where the building blocks of experience cross and come to a synthesis and further challenged, and this is where decision makers place their hope.